Art depicts life

Last Suppers keep getting bigger. Two researchers looked at 1,000 years of Last Supper paintings, and found that the size of plates and portions have grown by 69 percent. That’s a lot of calories. Here’s a piece about the work: Growing by Biblical Proportions

It’s obvious that economic success brings the ability to feast more elegantly, which we might expect art to reflect. I wonder if the art also suggests a change in the role of the church. Did it call on us to sacrifice more 1,000 years ago, the time of the Crusades? Did portion sizes correlate with changes in the political influence of the church? Did it reflect a shift in theological understanding? Perhaps we’ve come to believe that Jesus was given a sumptuous Passover meal, just as earlier that week Mary washed his feet with an extravagant amount of nard.
I like the clever use of the humanities to provide a measure of life. I suspect, though, that modern paintings of the Last Supper don’t do justice to the amount of food we could eat. Look at these 1990s paintings by Aleksander Balos and Bohdan Piasecki. Not too much food there.